I found out by accident. I hadn't known, or even suspected he had it, until I saw a TV show about it. Then I researched it online, and the symptoms fit him to a T. I first heard about it a few years ago, in a discussion online about the late Syd Barrett. It was suspected he had it too, but I say he didn't. I still say his symptoms pointed to a kind of schizophrenia exacerbated by heavy psychedelic drug use. Syd's problems took hold when schizophrenia usually does, in his early 20s. The *other* problem is present since early childhood. Of course Syd's sister denies he had *any* issues, but that is typical of a close family member, always denying there is a problem. Unless it really hurts you. Then you know there is something terribly wrong, but no one believes you. Especially when there is no name for it at that time.

I believed me. I always knew there was a problem, but never knew what it was. I wanted to be a psychologist when I was young...as an alternative to an artist. I considered it, but I wasn't very good at sciences and really didn't like studying that much. And anyway, people said that those who become psychologists are just trying to make sense of their own messed up past. Well, I guess that's true, at least it was in my case.

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Last year, a friend who I hadn't talked to for many years asked me just what was it about him after all this time that still bothers me so? Still at a loss for words, or diagnosis, I told her in the only way I knew how: "He is a very different person from me." Extremely different. I am so glad he is extremely different from me, and that would explain so much...our fighting, our inability to get along, his non-compassion, non-empathy, rigid, immobile, unspontaneous conservativeness, a textbook case for his condition. It also relieves me so, because I know then that *I* don't have it myself, something that did worry me. After all, I do cut tags out of my clothes, and I do really get into subjects that I'm interested in and am able to concentrate very well on them. But fortunately, that's where the similarity ends. I'm not big on nerdy subjects. I only took two semesters of high school math and then stopped. I couldn't test out of any math credits for college, so I took the required math course ("math for humanities majors" as I dubbed it). Yes, I did well in math, but I didn't see the point in continuing. Had I had the *syndrome*, I probably would've continued through Calculus. I also read people really well and am good at picking up on facial expressions. I want to be touched and wanted, and I love to be with my friends, and love doing things that are totally unplanned on the spur of the moment. I'm also concerned about looking good when I go out in public. I had to make an emergency run to the store today for some Coca Cola because Price Charming had an upset stomach. But not before I brushed my hair and put on some eyebrow darkener and lipstick. If I had *the condition*, I certainly wouldn't have taken those steps because I wouldn't have a perception of self and how I appear to others. If I had *the syndrome*, I wouldn't have fought so much with him because we would've understood eachother. As it is, he can't understand me and my "normal" (although not normal in a typical suburban soccer mom sort of way) lifestyle, and I can't understand his lifestyle of emptiness, nothingness, self-denial, self-righteousness, rigidity, piety, etc.

I took a test online the other day. It confirmed I do not have it. But what is an online test, anyway? That's no better an indicator than someone without a clinical background diagnosing someone with a certain condition, which is what I'm doing. But what is a psychiatrist anyway? They diagnose a patient who they see for a few hours, but they've never lived with that person. They've never had any deep emotional pain caused to them from that person. What would make them know anymore than someone who's felt that pain, and who's taken time to research the condition?

At least I can put a name on it now. After 45 years, I finally have an answer. Of course The Queen of Denial isn't saying much. I present her with the information, and she says it sounds interesting, but she hasn't had time to look it up. Whatever, Cleopatra. Cleopatra has been a super enabler to his condition. Sure she gets very infuriated with him and mad at him, and she says he's getting worse. But if she was serious about not being a co-dependent, she would've left him ages ago--my childhood fantasy.

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The thing is, I'm not mad at him anymore. I realize there is a problem and it now has a name and I'm not the only person in history who has had to deal with this sort of thing. I used to feel so alone, as do others in my situation, and I wished he was an alcoholic instead because at least then I'd be in the company of millions. But now I know he can't help it. And he doesn't do things to be mean, it's just that he can't see the world in the way so-called normal-functioning people see the world. I'm not angry at *him*. But I'm still angry.

Labels: The Syndrome

I was in an unfamiliar house with large plate glass windows. For some reason, I was partially disrobing in front of the window, lowering my shirt so that my breasts were exposed, pulling down my pants. I caught my reflection in the window and I was thin like I was in college. Then I saw someone outside and I pulled my clothes back up. It was an older couple, maybe in their late 60s, people I've never seen before. They looked well-off, as did other people who followed them inside. It was like a weird family reunion. I was going in rooms in the house to get away from all these invading people, but to no avail. Then Stan and I got an idea to leave. The next part of the dream found Stan and I up around Marinette, WI/Menominee, MI. We were on foot crossing the state line, walking across the bridge. (Weird IRL thing..the road we were on is called Bridge Street) As we left Wisconsin and headed to Michigan, it suddenly turned foggy and snowy, while it remained clear in Wisconsin. There was a grey-colored hotel right there that we went into. We were with a couple other people, but as we got into the motel we were with a huge number of Stan's relatives...his sister and brother-in-law, their kids, Stan's Mom and Aunt, and possibly other people I didn't know. I thought we were supposed to get away from people. There were two double-beds and one smaller bed pushed up against one of the doubles, all had 1970s gold-colored bedspreads. There wasn't going to be enough room there for all of us (especially for me who has to have either a bed to myself, or a king if I share). I think I told Stan I wanted to leave.

Labels: Dreams

I was in the yard of a house in the country...not isolated country, because there was another house maybe 100 feet away or so. I think maybe we owned the house of the yard I was standing on, because I looked at the other house and was thinking that maybe we could paint the side that faced us to match our own house on our property. The neighbor's house was dark green in color, maybe had several levels. As I looked closer, I noticed there was cheap plywood or masonite on the sides, painted to match the rest of the house. It looked added on to. The roof shingles were in very bad shape. There were people in the yard of the neighbor's house, possibly a landlord or realtor showing prospective residents around. I followed them to a very strange outbuilding. It was a little hut that covered some cement stairs. The man showing people around looked sort of like a cross between my late major professor and one of the vets on that Emergency Vets Animal Planet show, although in the dream he was neither of them. He said that if you go down the stairs in the hut, it leads to a room underground that you can use for a nice breakfast nook. I thought it odd that one would have to go outside, down some creepy stairs into a subterranean breakfast nook to eat. That sounded downright antithetical to a nice breakfast nook. But nonetheless I took a look at the nook. (sorry...couldn't resist) It wasn't at all like I pictured. Instead of going down underground, it curved around and then there were more stairs that went up, up into a greenhouse! It was a nice greenhouse that reminded me of the one on campus where they have the somewhat-annual Titan Arum, or maybe "The Plantorium" in Laporte, CO. Stan was in the greenhouse...I guess he had found it before me. But the really weird part was that there was this device in the center that acted sort of like a carnival ride. You sat on some sort of seat that was suspended by a rope, and it would swing you around the greenhouse, which now seemed to have enlarged quite a bit. It was rather fun, and as I encircled the greenhouse, I could get a view of the Capitol. It was very misty, sort of the way it looked yesterday evening IRL. Naturally, as all odd forms of locomotion in dreams inevitably end in disastrous ways, I woke up with a start as I was probably about to crash.

Labels: Dreams

A couple nights ago I had a dream that Stan and I were at the house we used to live in on Grant Street in Ft. Fun, except it was the mutated dream version of the house which entails a rather complex basement structure which is much more vast with several levels. We were standing outside the house too, and Stan was working on making a scalloped border of bricks along the sidewalk, which actually looked more like the sidewalk by our house on Peterson Street because there really wasn't a sidewalk where we lived on Grant Street. I looked up at the house and it was on brick stilts, so there wasn't a basement. It looked very small, like a cabin of only about 400 sq. ft, and built entirely out of stone. Windows surrounded the entire perimeter of the house, small windows right under the eves. I looked up at the house and said, crying, "I miss this place SO MUCH." I really longed to be back there in the dream. IRL, I'm glad I'm here. Even if Stan and I had decided to stay in Ft. C. and not move here, we wouldn't have been able to afford a place as nice as what we have here, not that what we have is nice by common suburban spoiled American standards, but it's nice for us. We only would've been able to afford some peasly little basementless 1 story pre-ranch post-bungalow boring thing in Ft. C. But it probably would've had a nice big yard.

Last night I dreamt I received two negatives in my ebay account by some customer that had "bt" at the beginning of their ebay username. I was glad to find I didn't have any negatives awaiting my ebay account when I woke up.

I also remember a dream last night or early this morning where I was at Tim's parents' house and it was like a barn inside, or rather their house was inside a barn. His whole family, including siblings whom I've never met IRL, was there and they were doing farm work.

Labels: Dreams

In the first part of this dream, I had met a guy with sort of longish dark blond hair, sort of balding with lighter blond on top where he was a bit bald (much balder than Stan). I think he was younger than me. He introduced himself (I forgot if he said his name) and showed me beads that he made, sort of a cloudy glass bead made in the shapes of fish and seashells, sort of like some of the Bali Silver fish beads I use in my jewelry sometimes. As he was talking to me, he was getting really close to my face. I saw that his eyes were green like mine, and then this weird feeling came over me, and him, like we were soulmates or something. He had sort of strange prominient high cheekbones, but other than that, he was pretty generic looking.

In the second part of the dream, I dreamt that Stan and I had either murdered or desecrated the remains of "Sasquatch." We were trying to get rid of the evidence, and somehow managed to hide the bones above the wheel well on a bus. Later in the dream, there were these mafia guys in a bus depot, one of which was Alec Baldwin. I was looking at a bus (a different bus than before) that was yellow like a schoolbus and noticed that there was a seam above the wheel well, and somehow I knew that there was a body stored in the side of the bus there, much like in the way we disposed of Sasquatch's bones. I looked over at the Mafia guys, and Alec Baldwin was looking over at me with an expression like he knew that I knew that there was a body in the bus.

Alec Baldwin? Ha ha!

Labels: Dreams

I woke up way too early this morning with a cough that wouldn't stop and I couldn't get back to sleep too easily. I had to endure a frivolous first hour of WPR with an interview with someone who wrote a book on "Comfort Food." Callers would call in with their own personal comfort food, one of which was sauerkraut. Sauerkraut? I don't know about you, but that's my idea of Discomfort Food. Not much in the world is more disgusting than Sauerkraut, unless there's an even more disgusting dried out pork chop served alongside it. One odd comment was that no one thinks of salad as comfort food. Huh? Well, yeah, if there's grated carrots and raisins in orange jello over lettuce, yeah, that's not exactly comforting. But what about a big salad with crunchy iceberg lettuce (I know, iceberg lettuce is not "healthy" lettuce, and I love leaf lettuce too, but we're talking *comfort food* here), tomato slices, hard boiled eggs and cheese topped with a hugely generous serving of zesty ranch dressing? Tell me that's not comforting! Sure beats what one guy called in with: a grilled bologna sandwich pressed real thin. Grossssssss!!!!!

Labels: This Boring Life

I'm not sure if all these dreams were dreamt together or if they're related or not, but they make a good trilogy.

For some reason, somebody handed me a small, naked male infant and told me to hold it. It was loosely wrapped in a grey blanket, and there was yellow stains on its belly from urine. It wasn't a White child, but not Black either...maybe Asian or Hispanic. It had a very round face. I was a bit grossed out by it because I'm not a baby person, and held it under its arms so the rest of its body swung freely. It started chewing on its blanket, but its face was so round and blunt, it looked more like my Pug, Lucifer Sam, when he was a puppy and would chew on blankets. I guess that sort of endeared me to the sprog...but not entirely.

Persephone (our old cat) was longer and even leaner than she is IRL, and she was wearing a red fur catsuit that pretty much covered her entire body except her face and a bit of her chest. The parts of her that were exposed were White Human-skin-colored (pinkish), so instead of looking like a cat, she looked like an imp (which is how I described her in the dream). She was also very jumpy and would jump up on me as I was standing. Odd.

I dreamt I was at an old wooden desk and I opened up the top drawer. In it I found items that belonged to my friend Barb. One was a letter wrote to someone named Steve, which I decided not to read, plus some photographs. One photograph was of pre-adolescent girls, maybe about a half dozen to a dozen or so, two rows of them lined up facing the camera. In the lower right side there was a me. I was holding some kittens. On my right side was Barb. We looked about 5-6th grade or so, but we didn't know eachother then. (IRL, I did have pictures of myself and Barb holding my parent's cat's kittens, but we were in 9th grade) But in this photo, her hair was longer (like it was in 6th) and I wasn't as skinny as I was in 9th, but I did have braces (which I didn't get til 9th) so go figure. Then the picture started to move as if it was video in paper form. I was talking about something. There was also a fascinating building that we were standing in front of. It was an apartment building about 4 or 5 stories tall, dark brick, with rounded glass windows on enclosed patios on the sides (i.e., the windows weren't circular-shaped; they were tall rectangular windows, but they were rounded so they weren't flat on a plane...if that makes sense). The building actually looked more like some china cabinets I've seen...but on a grand architectural scale. I was still confused about when this picture could have been taken, especially with all these other girls, but I remembered that there was a time when I went on a picnic with her family down to a beach and we had a potluck and there were a lot of other people there (not IRL, but in dream logic I remembered this). Then, don't tell me how this happened, but I look up from the desk and there I am, right in front of the actual building that is in the picture I am holding. The building location (not the building itself) reminds me of a couple areas here on the east side of Madison...one is on Rusk Street as if comes off of Atwood and Starts to curve...there's some nice old BIG Victorian/post-Victorian frame houses there (but not red brick), and the other is down on Jenifer/Spaight near the Orton Park Beach where there are a lot of old Victorian houses. It was a very weird sensation to be right in front of the building you saw in a picture taken decades ago in another state. Then, I think Barb came in later and I was explaining to her the weirdness of the house/photo thing, and I'm talking about how things like this can happen even if you're an atheist, and that Stan and I have a name for this and it's called..and then I woke up, right then and never got to finish what I was saying.

Labels: Dreams

Although the actual Blogger site does not make my browser (Safari 2.03) crash, visiting Beta Blogger Blogs (hosted on blogspot, of course) that have implemented some sort of hacks or 3rd party Page Elements or javascript have been crashing my broswer. This is the third time. The only reason I'm visiting these blogs (which I find through Google) is because I'm looking for information on how to customize Blogger Beta on blogspot (just in case I want to...in the future) I'm going to post each time I crash. Since this blog is well-googled, maybe someone will take note, however I feel like I'm screaming in a vaccuum.

Also, when I signed up for Google Checkout, something there made my broswer crash too, so to complete setting my preferences correctly, I had to continue in Firefox.

Come on, I give my sites I design a good checkover in Safari, Firefox and even MSIE. And I probably have one billionth the resources as Google/Blogger. What's so hard to make it so that your code doesn't crash Safari? Safari!!! 2.0!!!! We're not talking Netscape 3.0!

Labels: Blog Info

Stan and I were at a party that seemed like something out of Europe in the 1700s, however we were amongst the peasants, not foppish noblepersons. I can't remember who we were with, possibly my parents, because Stan picks me up and holds me as high as he can and I'm calling out "Muzzah, Fazzah!" ala the fake German accent Mike Meyers had on SNL doing "Dieter's Dream." It is very crowded and we somehow manage to escape into a large, vacant palace with off-white marble walls with arches and columns. We notice that something is going on in one room, so we enter, and I see it is our friend Kay whom we haven't heard from or seen forever. She is having an art exhibit in that room. In the dream her art I could easily replicate...lots of scumbled paint with blacks, reds, golds and whites. Some had silhouettes of human figures against a rectangular color field of yellow ochre with grey scumbled over it. Nothing was really spectacular. I think her husband Tom was there too. There were also some people sitting off to the side, a mix of Blacks and Whites, working class types, not art opening types. I started to talk to them and we were laughing, and I thought it was odd that I was talking to and getting along with these very un-art types more so than the art types. Afterward, I went home and started constructing painting surfaces to do a series of small paintings with odd human figures with large heads, almost cartoony. One painting would have one figure, another two, another three, etc. The only way I could describe these figures would be "large heads with their mouths open showing teeth, very crude and abstract, utilizing red, white and black. I have no idea why I wanted to paint in this style. I certainly have no desire to now that I'm waking.

Labels: Dreams

I just "upgraded" this blog (which will soon be mandatory) to the new version of Blogger. Supposedly I can do "labels" (like Dreams, Politics, Vacations, etc.), but haven't figured out how to put them off in the navbar yet.

Still working on it.

Also, due to some comment spam, have now made registering with Blogger mandatory before commenting.

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Edited to add:

OK, you know what? Screw it. After spending more time than I should've poking around Blogger's Un-Help pages, and not finding a gdam thing to aid me in figuring out how to add a simple list of labels to my template, I decided to Google something like "adding label widgets to blog". I came upon two pages with examples--supposedly they had examples, I really didn't know because each fking page crashed my gdam browser. Screw it, however it's done must involve some whacky hack that is Safari-incompatible. So if you don't like that I don't have neat neat neat little categories in my sidebar, too bad. This just isn't worth the headache. I'm not even sure how I was able to switch in the first place since I FTP and I'll be damned if I go on the proprietary blogspot.

Labels: Blog Info

I dreamt that Stan and I were visiting a single male friend who seemed like either Tim or Dale (but not Bill). We had a small rodent, either a rat or a gerbil, and we gave it to him as a present. I placed it on a table and petted it, and the guyfriend started to pet it too, but then he started rolling it like it was a tube of dough. As he was rolling it on the table, the animal's hair started growing longer and lighter colord, and I was afraid he was killing it. I told him to stop it, so he let go. The animal staggered around, dizzy. I was glad he didn't kill it, but didn't know if it would survive. He didn't seem all that thrilled that we had given this gift to him, and then I realized what a stupid idiot I was for gifting an animal. I asked him if he would rather us have the animal instead, and he said he would. In the meantime, the animal started to grow before our eyes, and its fur changed color from brown to a dark, dark green, almost black. It reached the size of a piglet or 20-lb pug dog (although it still had distinct "rodent features"). I could deal with a caged rodent (although IRL I will never get another rodent due to allergies), but what was I going to do with this thing that was larger than our cats and weighed as much as our dogs?

Labels: Animals, Dreams

I had a few dreams lately that I'll include here:

I was signing up for military service with some branch of the services, but I'm not sure which one. I guess if I were doing this IRL I would sign up for the Army - like Willard in Apocalypse Now - not that I would sign up for any services. When I was young I was completely disinterested in any military things. Basically, I don't like guns and that puts me out of having any 'sane' reason for signing up for service. It is very strange to me that I was signing on to serve my country in a dream. What was I thinking?

Another dream I was with an old woman. She insisted that I smoke a cigarette with her. Here again I hate the smell of cigarettes and really don't want to smoke anything. I liked them when I was younger, but now they repulse me. So... in the dream I smoked the cigarette with the old woman and she smoked one too. Then I met up with my cousin John (who passed away by suicide over 25 years ago) and he asked me if I smoked a cigarette with the old woman and I told him that I did. John became very angry with me and I couldn't figure out why. We drove around in the old gold van and it was as rusty and noisy as ever. This van went to the crusher about a year ago with over 220 thousand miles on it. So in this dream I was smoking with an elderly woman and then driving around in a van that's been destroyed for a year with my cousin - who's been dead for over 25 years - as my passenger. I hope this dream doesn't mean something really bad is going to happen?

Labels: Dreams

I've had some odd dreams lately, but I've not really had the time nor desire to document them. They've been rather jumbled and intense, but hard to remember due to their very congested nature. I do remember parts of dreams from nights ago, one was I was holding a small bird, possibly the same bird that will resurface in my dream last night. In the other dream, I was in the living room with Stan, but @ the same time we were in a bed in a room that sort of looked like the small bedroom in Montrose, but on a grander scale. We had the windows open and someone I used to know from work @ Depressions (Laura) stopped by to collect a project I was freelancing on, except this was at night and she stopped by the window instead of at the door. We talked out the window some (it was a warm summer night, very unlike the way it is now), and she filled me in on gossip @ Depressions. IRL, Laura stopped working for them a few years before they went out of business, so she wouldn't be able to fill me in on it anyway.

A couple nights ago I had a dream I was on stage with Seinfeld and Kramer (no psychotic racist outbursts, fortunately) and we were doing a funny skit that just had me in stitches (I can't remember what it was though) and I was laughing so hard I woke up laughing, and in that state of laughing-while-waking, I had this incredible euphoric sensation that enveloped my entire body in a tingling manner, not like nerve-damage tingling or pins and needles tingling when a limb has fallen asleep, but good tingling, opiatic endorphin rush tingling. It was an incredible sensation.

Last night I had a dream that seemed to last forever. The first part that I can recall was that I was in a marketplace area with animals and vegetable stands. There were some birds, and there was one bird that took a liking to me. It was iridescent bluish-turquoise...very pretty, large hand-sized with a big head, sort of like crossing a bluebird with a peach-faced lovebird, but bigger. It decided it wanted to ride atop my head, so I wore this bird on my head for the rest of the dream. Despite this area was still like a market in a poorer country, we were somehow also close to Lamya and Russ's house, so we decided to go there. I don't think Russ knew we arrived, because as we were sitting in the living room talking to Lamya, Russ comes in from the outside and he is completely nude (PG-13 rated nude...just a side profile). He sees us there and I think he goes to put some clothes on. I thought it was odd...I didn't know they were nudists, and what is he doing walking around outside nude anyway? The strange thing is that Lamya didn't seem like herself...she had fancy large dark-tinted glasses and metal teeth and was having trouble talking, like the metal teeth were making it hard. She was also dressed not like herself...lots of jewelry, hair poofed up and sort of artificial looking. I thought it was odd. They asked us which car we took, and I glanced outside to point to our red van, but I point to a different red van instead, that has people in it. Then I see our van and the back hatch is open, and our dogs are in kennels inside of it. I tell Stan to go close the door, as I worry about our dogs being able to escape somehow. Outside, it looks nothing like L&R's IRL neighborhood, but instead like motel made out of adobe, and each unit is individualized with paintings in sort of an ethnic Mexican style, yet at the same time sort of upscale. I noticed that Lamya had been working on painting their apartment/home exterior but it wasn't completed. Also, there were some people from Depressions there, two women who used to work more in the publishing area (as opposed to us typesetting slaves). I think I was asking them to fill me in on gossip.

As the dream ended, the bird had not left my head, but when I woke up he was gone.

Labels: Animals, Dreams